Walking out of Tuesday’s Cannes premiere, a local remarked how delightfully New York-y “A Private Life” felt. At first, the comment struck me as odd – Gallic spirit so suffuses this Paris-set cerebral thriller that even star Jodie Foster spends most of the film drinking wine, puffing on cigs, and speaking in la langue de Molière. But I could also see what my colleague meant, given director Rebecca Zlotowski’s choice to plays her murder mystery as a wry and Woody Allen-esque riff on neuroses.
Flexing her French-language skills for the first time since Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “A Very Long Engagement,” Jodie Foster ably slips into the role of an expat shrink, and thankfully so, because the filmmaker wrote the film for the American star. And so it should come with little surprise that playing Dr. Liliane Steiner plays to Foster’s strengths; hitting notes of head-strong fragility, she finds peak form as a psychiatrist whose own professional acumen is a bit more ambiguous.
In any case, Dr. Steiner is certainly a busy shrink, running her practice out of a Parisian flat spacious enough to let you know that she’s not wanting for work. But time is money, of course, and once longtime patient Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira, in flashbacks) fails to show for her third consecutive appointment, Liliane gets more than a little mad. That anger quickly dissipates upon the news that Paula is no more, before turning inward when the cause of death is revealed to be suicide using medication Liliane prescribed.
Or was it suicide? Circumstantial factors could point towards foul play, while Liliane keeps on turning up motives from her patient’s daughter (Luàna Bajrami, of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) and husband (Mathieu Amalric, of half the French films you’ve ever seen) the closer she looks. And lest you think it’s all in her head, how else can you account for the ominous calls, cabinet break-ins and escalating aura of menace that begins shading her personal and private lives? The doctor has grounds for suspicion and cause for concern, but she doesn’t exactly have the skillset of a detective: She’s trained to ask questions in order to prolong and delay any sense of resolution.
“A Private Life” almost plays as anti-thriller as Zlotowski and co-writer Anne Berest (“Happening”) detail all the ways the doctor is not up to the task. Liliane looks inward in lieu of looking for clues, turning to a hypnotherapist to unlock secrets from her past life. Turns out her estranged son was once a Nazi – a revelation that doesn’t sit too well in this Jewish French clan – while her ex-husband never showed up in her subconscious at all. Still, that does little to faze the amiable ex (a very winning Daniel Auteuil) who joins the investigation as a kind of Watson – only this one actively trying to get into the great detective’s pants.
Overlaying codes of film noir with marital farce, “A Private Life” aims for a similar tonal register to “Elle” – or, towards a lighter end, to “Manhattan Murder Mystery” – without quite achieving the same deft footing. Though certain tonal leaps don’t always land, the film still offers plenty of fun, especially when centering around two exes more interested in each other than the case at hand. The same could be said of Zlotowski herself, who revels in suspenseful set-ups and stylized set-pieces, only to deflate them with a winking diagnosis of paranoid psychobabble. Intriguingly, the film never fully commits to a stance on the talking cure: it’s too engaged and genuinely curious to play as outright satire, yet too mischievous to pass as in-depth analysis. Without making too many assumptions about the filmmaker’s private life, her work here belies an irreverence born of deep familiarity.
And if I may – speaking as someone who saw elements of their own private life reflected on screen – that familiarity is sublime. Foster is extraordinarily believable as an expat almost-but-not-quite integrated after decades abroad. She breaks up her almost-but-not-quite fluency with the odd grammatical slip or break into her native tongue, if only to get her idea across in the most efficient way. Liliane stands at a vast and barely perceptible linguistic divide from even those closest to her – a fitting predicament for shrink who can’t get out of her own head, and a testament to the observation and precision both Zlotowski and Foster bring to this film.
